Stars Discovered At Cannes

Cannes 2015 Is Ending - But We're Betting We Haven't Heard The Last From These 10 New Rising Stars

For the past eleven days, Hollywood has been keeping a close watch on the south of France where the Cannes Film Festival has been touting the latest films and filmmaking talents from around the world. The festival wraps tomorrow with the awards announcement, when we find out who will take home the coveted Palme D’Or.

Presiding over the selection are the Coen Brothers, who won the Palme D’or almost a quarter-century ago for 1991’s Barton Fink. They serve as presidents on a jury that includes Guillermo Del Toro — whose Cronos won Cannes’ Critics Week prize in 1993 — and Xavier Dolan, who can thank the festival for keeping his career going for the past five years. These guys, who will be passing the torch at tomorrow’s awards ceremony, are just a small sampling of the big names discovered on Cannes’ famed Croisette. Here are ten more.

Jack Nicholson

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Jack Nicholson’s ear-to-ear grin didn’t win over audiences immediately. The actor spent years struggling in front and behind the camera. He had actually resigned himself to be a writer. Then he got the opportunity to tackle a meaty supporting role with his pals Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda. The movie in question was the counterculture classic Easy Rider, which Nicholson knew was going to be special on his way up the red carpet at its Cannes premiere in 1969. “When my character came on the screen, I felt the movie take off in the audience,” Nicholson recalled in an interview. Nicholson went on to describe that during Easy Rider’s Cannes premiere, he looked at himself and said, “My God, I’m a movie star!”

George Lucas

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A long time ago, George Lucas was a struggling filmmaker whose debut sci-fi film THX 1138 was performing poorly. That was 1971, when Lucas was invited to bring the struggling film to be shown in Cannes in the newly developed Director’s Fortnight program. Lucas went, not so much to tout THX 1138 at the festival but to meet with United Artists film executive David Picker. During the meeting, in a large suite at the Carlton Hotel, Lucas pitched Picker his idea for a coming-of-age comedy that every other studio kicked to the curb. That became American Graffiti. Picker also inquired if Lucas had any other ideas for movies, so the filmmaker mentioned a Flash Gordon-style space opera fantasy he’s been tinkering with. And that’s how Stars Wars was born.

Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro

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Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro — the duo behind The King of Comedy, Raging Bull and Goodfellas — began their collaboration with Mean Streets, which played at Cannes in 1973 and signaled more good things to come. Their next pairing would rock Cannes. In 1976, the European festival was introduced to DeNiro’s tortured antihero Travis Bickle in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. The film was booed at Cannes and condemned for its brutal violence, yet somehow the jury, headed by legendary playwright Tennessee Williams, just couldn’t resist awarding it the Palme D’or. “Watching violence on the screen is a brutalizing experience for the spectator,” Williams told the press shortly after, as if he needed to offer an apology for rewarding what will go down as a classic. “Films should not take a voluptuous pleasure in spilling blood and in lingering on terrible cruelties as though one were at a Roman circus.” That’s how Scorsese was announced to the world.

Steven Soderbergh

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There would be no Tarantino without Steven Soderbergh. The director behind Out Of Sight, Traffic and the Ocean’s Eleven movies kickstarted the 90s American indie scene that nurtured Tarantino’s career. Soderbergh did that with sex, lies and videotape. His 1989 feature debut about one man’s voyeurism fetish was discovered at Cannes, where it won the Palme D’or before becoming a huge international success. That was the first step in Soderbergh’s illustrious career and the first hit for Bob and Harvey Weinstein, whose Miramax films would become pretty major on its heels.

Quentin Tarantino

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Quentin Tarantino first entered Cannes with an out-of-competition screening for 1992’s Reservoir Dogs, which followed the film’s Sundance premiere to cement the young director as a talent to watch. Tarantino’s second Cannes outing in 1994 was the real game changer. Winning the Palme D’or for Pulp Fiction, Tarantino surprised the world while being baptized by the European festival as an auteur to be reckoned with. He wasn’t the favorite to win. One audience member at the awards repeatedly heckled “scandal,” to which Tarantino flipped the bird — that being his first gesture upon receiving the most coveted prize among cinephiles.

Paul Thomas Anderson

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PTA is the most talented filmmaker working today, delivering modern masterpieces like The Master and Inherent Vice. He stopped by the Cannes Film Festival in 1996 with his feature debut Hard Eight aka Sydney. The slick neo-noir was merely a test run for the young director, who was 26 at the time, but it was enough to solidify a towering career. Recalling his experience discovering Hard Eight at Cannes, the late Roger Ebert wrote, “I felt I was watching the work of a born filmmaker.”

Denis Villeneuve

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French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve just might nab the Palme D’or tomorrow for his moody cartel thriller Sicario, starring Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin and Benecio Del Toro. This isn’t Villeneuve’s first stint at the festival. He’s been attending since 1997, when his short film was a part of the anthology Cosmos. He returned with his feature debut, 1998’s August 32nd on Earth, and again in 2009 for his film on the Montreal Massacre Polytechnique. Currently, Villeneuve is among the most sought-after talents after winning an Oscar nomination for Incendies and proving that he can go above and beyond with the Hollywood thriller Prisoners. This is the guy that has been entrusted with the Blade Runner sequel. Winning the Palme D’or tomorrow can’t make his career any hotter than it already is.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

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Long before he won the Oscar for Birdman, Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu was at Cannes. His stunning debut about class, crime and globalization, Amores Perros, won the Critics’ Week prize in 2000 — the same award his friend Guillermo Del Toro picked up in 1993 for Cronos. Innaritu went back to Cannes with Babel and Biutiful, before hijacking the last awards season with Birdman. He’s currently completing The Revenant, a western starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy.

Jessica Chastain

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After a string of television guest spots and minor film roles, Jessica Chastain won Cannes in 2011. That’s when she appeared in an angelic performance as the matriarch in The Tree of Life and, in an equally great turn, as the tortured wife of a possible schizophrenic in Take Shelter. Those films were two of the year’s best. The Tree of Life went on to take the Palme D’or while Take Shelter nabbed the Critics’ Week prize. Chastain cemented her A-list status in a week, going on to play the CIA agent who would hunt down Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty and a mobbed-up wife opposite fellow Cannes alum Oscar Isaac in A Most Violent Year.

Oscar Isaac

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The last Coen brothers film to premiere at Cannes, 2013’s Inside Llewyn Davis, threw a prominent spotlight on Oscar Isaac. His low-key, simmering performance as the titular Bob Dylan-era crooner helped the film score the Grand Prix (runner-up to the Palme D’or). Everyone was wondering where Isaac came from, despite the fact that he had actually been at Cannes a few times before. His minor roles in Agora, Robin Hood and Drive were faint memories, but Inside Llewyn Davis made Isaac the hot ticket he is today. Isaac recently starred in A Most Violent Year and Ex Machina, and will soon be seen as an X-Wing pilot in Star Wars: The Force Awakens and as the titular Apocalypse in the next X-Men movie.